Enough people took Brian Fargo's positive comments about Origin's support for crowd-funded games as an indication that Wasteland 2 might be an Origin exclusive that the inXile Entertainment CEO took to Twitter to correct that mistaken impression. He says: "It is absolutely NOT going to be exclusive on Origin. They are just one of many digital stores we will support." Thanks nin.

Bhruic wrote on May 19, 2012, 20:29:By all means, explain how giving developers 90 free days is abusive.

When you can't do that - because it's not - but you won't admit that EA is doing a decent thing, you'll understand why your hatred is blind.

It's designed to increase EA's market share, which it will then abuse in the same its been doing for decades. But don't get me wrong, I didn't claim that every single business decision that EA makes is inherently abusive. However, we don't know what terms Valve offers and it's entirely plausible / likely that it offers the same or better terms and EA is only responding because it doesn't want to be ignored as a platform.

Jerykk wrote on May 19, 2012, 19:37:I disagree that EA is the worst company in America. I think MS easily takes the cake for that. While EA has some anti-competitive practices (like requiring Origin for all their PC games), MS surpasses them.

I wasn't endorsing it as my personal opinion. There are plenty of banks and oil companies that are more deserving of the award. As for Microsoft, there is no disputing that it has abused its market position. Certainly it's not as bad as it used to be - largely because its influence has declined - but it still regularly screws over PC gamers in order to favour the X360. Then again, Intel did exactly the same thing to AMD. And Apple launches lawsuits at the drop of a hat, despite ripping off other companies ideas with reckless abandon. Microsoft took things too far but it moderated its business practices when it received a record fine from the EU (€899m /$1.44bn) - incidentally, Intel went on to receive an even larger fine (€1.06bn).

I am much more concerned about EA's business practices than those of Microsoft at the moment, though both are very troubling.